The Times
Article by Paddy Ashdown
Last week’s “Strategic Defence and Security Review”, or SDSR is not what wise heads would have brought forward if they had been starting with a blank sheet of paper.
But the Coalition had to start, not from scratch, but from what they found they found when they arrived in office.
A war to fight in Afghanistan – which has to come first. Another to fight on the deficit, which, if we lose it, will threaten our economy, our national cohesion and our capacity to defend ourselves all at the same time. Some criticise the SDSR because they say the Treasury had too big a hand in it. But every Defence Review is a tussle between what we ought to have and what we can pay for. It has to be so. You cannot defend a country with flights of fancy.
And above all an inheritance left behind by the last Government which combines incompetence and irresponsibility in equal measure. Labour allowed a defence budget of some £36 Billion to run at an annual deficit of £10 billion for years without lifting a finger to put this right; they failed utterly to check huge cost overruns, like the £800 million overspend on Nimrod MRA4 ; they presided over a Ministry of Defence which, under the last three Secretaries of State, has become increasingly dysfunctional (the old problem of Ministers without experience of conflict finding it difficult to say no to Service Chiefs with lots of scrambled egg on their hats); they ordered two aircraft carriers which the nation didn’t need and couldn’t afford – more it seems for political – even constituency – reasons, than those of national interest. And then they left behind a poison pill that made them more expensive to cancel than to build. The national interest (and the Coalition’s too I suspect) would be served by an immediate investigation into this fiasco by the National Audit Office
But the Coalition’s limited room for manoeuvre was an argument for giving the Review more strategic oversight, not less. The National Security Council (NSC) strategy paper which was genuinely new and commendably wide in scope. But then it all degenerated back, as so often in the past, into an unseemly and uncontrolled squabble between the Service Chiefs about who could hang on to their most iconic bits of kit. The NSC should have done much more to get control of the MOD when it became obvious that things were going awry. It should not have been necessary for one of the key players, General Sir David Richards, to have to do a side deal outside the Review with the Prime Minister in order to stave off Army cuts that would have terribly undermined the struggle in Afghanistan. Things finally came off the rails when the MOD’s proposals had to be taken over by the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister to sort out the mess.
So what of the proposals themselves?
Overall – and after Downing Street’s intervention – they seem to have made a pretty fair job of an awful inheritance.
But there are exceptions.
Because we have decided to keep both of Gordon Brown’s “white elephant” aircraft carriers, the Navy can’t have the escort vessels they need much more (not least to protect capital ships like aircraft carriers!). Was it really impossible to do deal with the ship builders to cancel at least one carrier, for more escort orders?
As it is, now, the devil, as ever, will lie in the detail.
Being lumbered with the two carriers is not without its risks. It’s a safe bet their costs will grow – possibly by enough to put at risk a defence budget which will remain precarious for at least the next four years. The upgrade of the first carrier with arrestor gear (the so-called “cats’n’traps”) will cost a lot of money (a billion or so, apparently), and relies on an a US electro-magnetic catapult which is as yet unproven in a maritime environment. We don’t yet know how we will crew or support these ships – or even whether they will be able to be properly serviced while alongside Portsmouth dockyard.
Its difficult, too not to conclude that, in cancelling the Navy’s Harriers and keeping the RAF’s Tornados, we got rid of the wrong fleet of aircraft. The reason for this, we are assured, is nothing at all to do with the fact that our retiring CDS is an RAF Air Marshal and everything to do with the war in Afghanistan; the Tornado (they provide only around 8% ISAF’s ground support assets) are more capable in the ground attack role than the Harriers which we used to have there. That may be so. But, if the question is whether to have marginally less capable ground support aircraft, or no carrier borne aircraft at all for the next decade, then the answer would seem to be pretty self-evident. The Government should re-visit this decision before the ink on the SDSR gets too dry and the mindsets in the MOD, too fixed.
But the main truth which leaps out of the whole SDSR process, is that we have an MOD which is no longer fit for purpose. One outcome of this Review should be that the MOD itself needs reviewing. And it can’t be done – it shouldn’t be done – just by insiders. No private business which found itself in this kind of mess would dream of trying to put itself right without outside help. Some of the Department’s miseries are not of their making. The MOD’s was not designed to fight wars; its role was to prepare for them. Directing a war is the job of politicians, not civil servants. But the refusal of the last Government – and especially the last Prime Minister – to take responsibility for this, meant that this task was dumped on the MOD. And this at a time when victory depends, not just on the armed services but on using all the levers available to the great Departments of state in a coordinated fashion. Mr Cameron promised to form a proper War Cabinet for Afghanistan. There seems to be a view in Downing Street that the NSC does this. It doesn’t. We need something much more like a command structure, than a committee. We need the MOD to focus on its original role as a strategic headquarters, in which the Chiefs of Staff Committee is dominant. And we need all this soon; not just for the Afghan war but for our war-torn Ministry of Defence as well.
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